For what feels like the first time in the history of American pop culture, whiteness is at the forefront of liberal white creators’ minds. Works of art centered on white people reckoning with their place in a white supremacist system have become a mini-genre of its own, and in this way, Tune-Yards’s latest album I can feel you creep into my private life is a sort of artifact of our times. The group’s first full-length album as a duo and Tune-Yards’s first release since 2014’s Nikki Nack, private life is Merrill Garbus’s self-professed personal exploration of her place as a cisgender white woman in a white supremacist patriarchal world. It’s a dance-pop, aspirationally zeitgeist-y album that holds the potential to be isolating in a way dance music rarely is, given that so much of its content is designed to provoke the listener. It also begs the question of who art like this — in which established ideas of whiteness are interrogated — is really for.

The topic of white guilt and reckoning with it is present on every Tune-Yards collection — “what’s a boy to do when he’ll never be a gangsta?” she bellowed back in 2011 — but on I can feel you creep into my private life, it is an all-encompassing anxiety that the listener must sit with as Garbus presents a musical document of self-accountability. Her crisp, round vocals belt and coo their ways through recognition and condemnation of her privileges as a white woman; the songs bounce back and forth between transportative catchiness and blunt, straightforward recitations of white studies lessons. Every wide-eyed statement on whiteness approaches sanctimony and self-aggrandizement in a way that feels genuine in its unpleasant clunkiness, given that few people know how to skillfully talk about this.

On I can feel you creep into my private life, white guilt is an all-encompassing anxiety that the listener must sit with.

In promoting the album, Garbus called attention to the work she did to learn about her own whiteness, noting that she attended a six-month course at the East Bay Meditation Center called “White and Awakening on Race.” But whereas dance music has the power to possess your body and enable you to shake past even the most unbearable emotional pain something, it doesn’t have quite the effect when it comes to rote recitations of what constitutes white privilege and supremacy. Some of the album’s most straight-ahead reckonings — like “Colonizer,” a slightly-poppy, noise-influenced testimonial of Garbus’s position as a white woman artist — had me questioning what I was gaining from listening. Her singing “I use my white woman’s voice” and “I smell the blood in my voice” feels like an admission of guilt meant to sound revolutionary to other white listeners, while also wading dangerously in self-aggrandizing ally territory. (In this sense, Garbus risks coming off like Macklemore, whose treacly conclusions at least serve an audience several times larger.)

private life is most successful when the lyrics allow the beats take the lead, opting for poetic simplicity that can be specific and resonant at once. “Honesty” leans heavily on 80’s new wave influences to communicate the destabilizing rush of anxiety that comes when a veil is ripped from one’s eyes. Garbus’s synthed voice chirping “Honesty gone, didn’t know right from wrong” under her soaring belt of “Do you really wanna know” in many ways feels more profound and exposed than her sing-songy on-the-nose declaration “But all I know is white centrality” on “ABC 123”. private life doesn’t say anything revolutionary about whiteness, white feminism, or cultural appropriation — it doesn’t need to, really, since no one was looking for that from Garbus. With its focus on those topics, the album is a natural progression for an artist who has long fielded questions of cultural appropriation.

On private life there are songs that declare white allyship by calling out white privilege for what it is and demonstrating for other white cis women how to do the same — and then there are the other songs that communicate the emotions of self-doubt, self-hate, mourning, and frank acceptance that come along with checking one's own privileges, no matter who you are. As a black woman with no desire to bear witness to a white person’s confirmation that white privilege exists, I was only interested in the latter, the songs that were more about commiserating that confessing and teaching. A natural byproduct of private life’s mission is that the white American gentrifying-class woman’s experience today is so crisp, so acute, so centered in this piece of art that it holds the power to alienate anyone who doesn’t find freedom in such a specific expression of that perspective. The album is perhaps successful as “a vessel for a cisgender, white woman in a heteronormative relationship to explore her place in the world,” as Garbus wrote in a letter to journalists covering the album, but its flirtations with teachable moments didn’t move me. It was only when Garbus got to the core of feelings more universal that I felt the instinct to move my body, allowed for a moment to forget the weight of white supremacy that Garbus is only beginning to recognize.